>wrong... apparently the virus could be triggered without opening the attachment under certain circumstances because I got infected and never opened the attachment. I'm thinking though maybe the author didnt have it working under all OS's and all versions of Outlook but the b****** had it working well enough to take me down.

Hmm...most unfortunate. We do not use that Outlook/systray setup here at all, so that certainly could be a cause. We have analyzed our infections now here:

10 users infected, and all of them admitted to opening the attachment. No one else, including people who opened the email but not the attachment, was infected.

The number 10 is amazing, the volume of virus-replicated email sent was just massive, often hundreds of messages per user were received. However, I'm quite sure we were receiving email from infected users all throughout the Fed Gov't, judging by the bizarre group names on some of the mail.